Testing with QEMU

QEMU is great for testing images and apps. There is no need to flash or install images back and forth on real hardware. Here are a few things that may help you testing OE stuff with QEMU. The qemu machines are available with the qemu prefix, currently qemumips, qemuarm, qemuppc, qemux86 and qemux86-64 are available.

You can boot images within QEMU using the runqemu command. It can boot disk images and also NFS images. NFS support uses the unfs user mode server and does not require root access. Sudo access is required for network device setup but there is a script that can create the tap/tun device in advance removing the need for root privledges.

The qemu targets support automatic testing of images so that they are booted after image creation. Please see local.conf.sample for details on how to enable this.